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The Weight Of A Human Heart. Ryan O'Neill (2012)

by Ryan O'Neill(Favorite Author)

3.94 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1908699205 (ISBN13: 9781908699206)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Old Street Publishing

review 1: I fell in love with this short story collection half way through the first story and maintained that level of excitement for all but one of them.Despite my immediate (and continued) love of this book, I can see how some readers might not find the writing style as exciting as I did and so I've been silently assessing everyone I know, trying to decide who best to share this gem of a collection with.
review 2: I received a free copy of this book from GoodReads for early review.Each story in this collection had a unique style, and although some other reviewers found this gimmicky, I thought it was clever and playful. So many of these stories looked at heavy, difficult subjects such as: the crumbling of a marriage communicated via graphs and charts ("Figures in a Ma... morerriage"); a child recalling the death of his whole family during the Rwandan genocide, shared through a written school exam ("The Examination"); the relationship of a father and son organized in snapshots of events in their family lives based upon four letter words ("Four Letter Words"); and a child dealing with the death of her mother and the discovery of her affair ("Tyypography"). The well-planned and executed stylistic choices for each story allowed the reader to digest sad and difficult subjects. I mention these as they were probably among my favorite stories for the blending of style, content and character.The first story, "Collected Stories," was one of the most moving for me. The story follows the relationship of an obsessive writer mother and her only daughter, seen through the daughter's eyes. At first glance the relationship seems very toxic, the mother completely self-centered and absent as a parent. Yet O'Neill skillfully drops small clues of the mother's love for her child, although she seems incapable of openly expressing it. This story builds so successfully to the last line, from which this collection gets its name (The Weight of a Human Heart), that I saw the mother's last literary publication to be a declaration of her love for her daughter. Whether this was intended or not, I was hooked on O'Neill's writing from that first story. less

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